Amazing Grace...

Jeremiah 31:2-3...

Sermon #1

DRIVING THEME:

Spiritual renewal and moral wholeness are available to us all.

PROPOSITION:

God's grace has come to us at unexpected times and in unexpected places. We need to respond.

THESIS:

In the midst of the apostasy of the nation of Israel Jeremiah reminded them that they had found grace in the wilderness. Grace is that act of God that interrupts our normal routine with blessings beyond our wildest imagination. This is what makes grace amazing! The Old Testament is replete with examples of God's intervention with grace into the lives of those who didn't deserve it.

In Genesis 21, Abraham and Sarah, who were way past their childbearing years, experienced one of God's unexpected blessings.
Jacob, guilty of the wildest of schemes to manipulate anyone who came into his path, discovered that he can wrestle with God until his unexpected touch in unexpected places came.
Moses, happily married to a raven-black beauty, one day ran into God's unexpected blessings on the backside of a mountain.
In 1 Samuel 1, a woman named Hannah prayed boldly for a child. God intervened and gave her a bridge between a judge named Samson and a king named Saul.
A preacher named Isaiah went to the temple for an ordinary time of blessing, but instead, he saw the Lord high and lifted up, sitting on the throne with his train filling the temple.

God, says Jeremiah, has visited us in the wilderness xperiences of life. The unexpectedness of God's visitation makes grace truly amazing.

ANTITHESIS:

Ever since John Newton, an ex-slave trader penned the words of that famous hymn in 1779, it seems that grace has gone on vacation. It is true that the original hymn never mentioned the word "God" or "Jesus Christ" in it, but in a generic sense, it spoke of the blessings we did not deserve. Like the people of Jeremiah's time, we have forgotten how good God has been to us.

Dr. Kortright Davis, in his lecture on the state of America on the 4th of July some years ago, said that America has become ungrateful through the sickness of the "I" disease. This disease has sapped the nation of any remembrance of the grace that has bestowed on it. There are four "I" diseases in the social, political, and economic life that rob us of the opportunity to be gracious.

We suffer from an overdose of Impressionism, fighting against truth. We have become obsessed with the passion to impress. In both the public and corporate structures of leadership, it is not how you deal with the truth, it is the impression that counts. The truth no longer matters.
We suffer from an overdose of Imitation. Bent on not being the odd person out, we express our creative intelligence with utter disregard for the other person let alone God. It may get us into trouble, we say, it is easier to do what they are doing, better to get lost in the ecology, to get lost in the crowd, to follow them, to imitate them and remain safe. We have forgotten God's grace
We also suffer from an overdose of national Impatience. We have forgotten what it means to wait. We refuse to wait on others or "give them a chance." We have become the controlling force behind time. It doesn't control us; we control it. And so we have no time or energy for the mentally challenged, the weak, the infirm, the marginalized, the poor, the homeless, the prisoner. We have become ingrates.

We are afflicted by an overdose of Insensitivity. The daily TV news of trauma and pain no longer cause us pain. We have become callused and unmoved by it. No one takes the time to wonder what must have happened to the family of the victims. We love it. Because we have forgotten God's grace abundant in our own lives, there is an absence of social compassion.

RELEVANT QUESTION:

From what are we saved and for what are we strengthened?

SYNTHESIS:

The grace of God is a profound comfort to those saved by grace. The grace of God has enabled us to overcome our feelings of guilt. We respond by becoming comforters to those deemed wretched, worthless, and guilty.

The grace of God strengthens and empowers believers through the many dangers, toils, and snares that confront them. We respond by addressing the societal and community deficits that incubate and nurture hopelessness.

The grace of God forgives the sinner, accepts the unacceptable, revives the spiritually dead, and enables a reunion between the Creator and the rebellious. We respond by becoming persons committed to the embrace of the broken and alienated into the community of the redeemed.

The grace of God is a formative, creative moment as a result of which a person is not only graced by God's love but also becomes gracious because of God's love. We respond by being compassionate to others. We need to rediscover what it means to be grace-like.